Swing baby Swing

One of the realities we deal with living in costal AK is the phenomal tide swings. Glacier Bay, Alaksa is home to the 3rd largest tide swing in the world, and the 2nd largest in Alaska. On a typical day these swings are anywhere from 12 to 18 vertical feet. (This means that our floating town dock will rise and lower by that height twice a day).

Today however, we are having the largest swing we'll probably see all summer. The Low tide this morning was a -4.4 and this afternoon it will be coming up to 15.5. This means our total swing will be 20.9 vertical feet. To serve as a comparison here are some tide swings for today for other US Cities:

Savannah, GA- 8 ft

Boston, MA- 11 ft

Seattle, WA- 13 ft

I took some pictures too! Here's the Gustavus town dock at low tide:

And here's the dock at High tide later in the afternoon:

Naturally, Duane, Sig and I went down to the beach to do some exploring, and Sig had a fantastic time chasing ravens and looking for clams. We also are watching the progress on our new town dock! I'll update with pictures, but for now here's the sign from the ground breaking.

Skies Break Open

I'll be honest, I was dreading today when I woke up this morning. It was raining again, (which is typical for this part of AK, but rare for this season) and I was headed out the door to go and guide a trip at Pt. Adolphus. Now, I do love being out at Adolphus, the whales out there are wonderful, and the sea lions are very entertaining, but I really wasn't in the mood to trying to convince people that beingout in the cold rain all day really was the most entertaining thing they could have done today.

As soon as we got over to Pt Adolphus though the skies totally broke open and it turned out to be a beautiful day! We had a whole group of sea lions that followed us around for a while and then we saw so many whales! One pair of the humpbacks got a bit closer to us than I was really ok with, but so it goes! We also saw a humpback breech 8 times in a row!

It's another one of those days that makes me fall even harder for Alaska!

Return of the Rain

It's been absolutely amazing how beautiful May and June have been up here in AK. Typically you can expect South East Alaska to be cold and wet most days, and having the weeks just puctuated with the occasional day of sunshine. However, in the last 6 weeks or so I've had to water my plants almost daily just to keep them from drying out.

Today however, I woke up to the ever so familiar sound of drizzle on the roof of the house. Sig and I went for a walk in the rain this morning and now I'm nustled down in the quiet office catching up after last week's chaos.

Gotta go prep for a day trip tomorrow. Let's hope we get some more of those sunny skies!

I'm afraid of June

Wow, I'm not being very good about this. Let's see, since the last post my brother has come and gone, my dad was here for a visit, Sig has shot up like a weed and chaos has erupted at the Gustavus office.

I knew that June was going to be crazy, but didn't think that crazy was going to be this crazy. For the last few weeks I've been running boat transfers, chasing squirrels out of the office, having staff coming and going, and the trip schedule has been completely stacked. One of the staff here joked that I should paint "Rachel's Taxi Service" on the side of the company van, because I've spent so much time just shuttling people around lately.

In other news: The ground breaking for the new Gustavus Dock is tomorrow! Everyone around town is pretty excited that part of the state stimulus money is coming here so that we can get a new dock. Ours is really old and is so small that we can't be on the state ferry system. A new dock will mean that it's going to be so much easier to get too and from Gustavus. Plus all the workers coming to town are just going to help bump the economy a bit in our small town here.

Ok, thats all for now, hoepfully more soon!

Satellite!

YAY! We're offically online with satellite internet at the Gustavus office! I feel like I'm able to work at the speed of light!

Sigurd

Pete and I came to the library to catch up on some higher speed internet for a bit, which means I can upload pictures!

This is Sigurd. Mostly known as Sig, but also commonly refered to as "small one", "monster", "little man" and "sig pig". He keeps me pretty busy during the day, because he is in serious chew phase and wants to eat everything he can get his little teeth on. We've discovered that he has two modes, he's either asleep or he turns into a total wild child (this is known as "wombat mode" in our house, even though he acts more like a tazmanian devil.). We tell ourselves he's going to grow out of this and calm down, but who knows. 

Today he is 3 months old, and he's growing like a weed. I think he looks like he has bat ears, but Duane disagrees. 

I'll post pictures of our house as soon!

Family Time

Greetings from Gusto! For a very small and quiet town things have been super busy. We had our first trip go out of the Gustavus base of AMG this weekend which kept me pretty busy. The students and staff arrived on Thursday evening, and then all day Friday I was working with the staff to get them prepped for their trip. Saturday and Sunday were dedicated to another deepwater rescue training class and then Monday was their food pack day. So there went my weekend. As much as I would have enjoyed some rest this weekend, it was pretty nice to have people around for a few days and keep things interesting.

Then on Monday my brother, Peter, arrived in Gustavus. He’s going to be staying with us here in town for a few weeks, just spending some time relaxing and seeing Alaska. It’s been fantastic to have him around the last few days, and I’m hoping we can get some good paddling adventures in around Gustavus while he’s here.